Self-styled ‘pure-play cloud-native’ service provider Civo has launched OpenCP. The company used its inaugural Civo Navigate conference held in Tampa, Florida this week to explain how its approach to cloud management technologies and tools has been augmented with this new development.

In basic terms, OpenCP is a new open source extension to kubectl – the Kubernetes Command-Line Interface technology used by software application developers to perform Application Programming Interface (API) calls.

Kubernetes provides a command line tool for communicating with a Kubernetes cluster’s control plane, using the Kubernetes API – kubectl is that technology – it acts as the primary interface for users to create and manage individual objects (or groups of objects) inside the totality of a Kubernetes cluster. 

Civo has explained OpenCP as a framework to build additional functionality on top of the widely-used kubectl to allow it to be used to control cloud services beyond ‘just’ Kubernetes. 

Kubernetes cockpit

To explain its usage, Civo says that we can think of kubectl as a set of cockpit controls to steer Kubernetes, allowing developers to manage and deploy applications on a cluster. 

It provides a consistent interface for creating, updating and managing resources in a Kubernetes cluster, such as pods, services and deployments. 

Developers laud kubectl for being both well-documented and extensible.

Standardized cloud commands

But there is a challenge here.

The challenge is that most Kubernetes clusters require a secondary set of tools – the tools to manage the underlying cloud services. From configuring firewalls to adding cloud storage, these tools are far from standardized and every cloud provider is different. OpenCP is an open source framework designed to standardize commands under one universal set of instructions that will work in any cloud environment.

“We are proud today to launch OpenCP to the tech community at Civo Navigate,” said Dinesh Majrekar, CTO of Civo. “[Today, we know that] kubectl is a much-loved tool and there are already a number of extensions available for it. However, OpenCP is designed to supercharge the tool, giving it the ability to control far more than just Kubernetes through a standardized and well-documented interface.

Civo suggests that this should be music to the ears of developers… but why?

Because every cloud has its own challenges and learning proprietary commands and techniques is one of them. The company says it wants to help developers get past the admin and start doing what they love – developing great software.

Lifting cloud lock-in

“The launch of OpenCP represents our continued commitment to putting the needs of developers first. We believe that the industry has for too long failed developers, pursuing siloed efforts to build up tools and functionality in their own isolated ecosystem rather than thinking about what’s best for their users,” said Mark Boost, CEO of Civo.

Boost suggests that OpenCP is designed to write a new chapter for Kubernetes, where cloud lock-in is designed out of the software stack and Kubernetes achieves its promise of application portability.

Put simply (claims Civo) with the OpenCP extension, kubectl ‘could’  become the new universal remote control for the cloud.

Following the launch of OpenCP, Civo plans to work closely with other industry players to widen adoption of the standard.

Image credit: Civo

CEO Mark Boost (right) speaking to technology guru Steve Wozniak (left) at the Civo Navigate keynote.